When Anna Boden stepped up to introduce her new movie, “Sugar,” to the opening-night crowd of the Dominican Republic Global Film Festival in November, she felt like a rookie reliever staring down at an All-Star lineup.

“It was totally nerve racking,” she says. “I was introducing the film and looking out at these huge stars. Sammy Sosa. Pedro Martinez. Big Papi.”

“And the president of the country,” adds Ryan Fleck, her co-writer and director.

But even the country’s president, Leonel Fernandez, would defer to the star power of his island nation’s leading export: big-time baseball players. Since Ozzie Virgil joined the New York Giants in 1956, the Dominican Republic has provided the American major leagues with talent like the Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, the Alou brothers, Rico Carty, Manny Mota and present-day stars like the aforementioned David Ortiz (Big Papi) of the Boston Red Sox, Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Robinson Cano of the New York Yankees and Jose Reyes of the New York Mets. Like the NBA in urban centers across America, beisbol for Dominicans is seen as the quickest, most glamorous route out of poverty, which in the Dominican Republic is as hard to ignore as the Caribbean Sea.

A talented player, a genuine prospect, is burdened not just with his own future but also that of his entire family. That desperate desire to escape, against almost impossible odds, exposes him to cultural discombobulation and the seamier aspects of the business of baseball. The psychic dislocation that results for the vast majority of those strivers, those that don’t make it, is the focus of “Sugar.”

The choice of “Sugar,” which opens Friday, seems an odd one for Fleck and Boden. Their previous film together, “Half Nelson,” which earned an Academy Award nomination for its star, Ryan Gosling, was about a drug-addicted New York City teacher. And Boden was only vaguely interested in baseball. (“My parents were basketball people,” she said.)

Though Fleck, who grew up in Oakland, remains an Athletics fan (and still watch games online), it wasn’t the sport that hooked them. It was discovering, after reading an article that referenced the Mets’ Dominican camp, that every major league team save the Milwaukee Brewers runs an academy in the country.

“We thought: ‘There are so many guys who go through this process every year. What happens to the guys who go through the process, and don’t make it?'” he says.

The stories informing “Sugar” initially came from places like Roberto Clemente Park in the Bronx, where players who have fallen short of the Dream still play a high level of amateur ball. Many of them, according to Fleck and Boden, were very open about their “failures.” Others were not.

“A lot of young guys we talked to hadn’t really come to terms with it at all,” Fleck says. “They tell us, ‘I’m going to go for a tryout with the Yankees,’ you know, some kind of open tryout in Staten Island. They were still optimistic they were going to make it.”

All signs in “Sugar” say the hero is going to make it, too. Played by the newcomer (and nonactor) Algenis Perez Soto, the talented Miguel Santos, nicknamed Sugar, survives the player mill of a Dominican baseball academy and is drafted by a professional team. As a result he’s sent to a minor-league team in Iowa, where the non-English-speaking Sugar is given a crash course in Middle American: the members of his host family are older, conservative baseball nuts; the granddaughter is born-again and tries to orchestrate Sugar’s religious conversion. The combination of a new world and a new level of competition disorients the once-grounded player.

Casting an unknown as Sugar “was pretty much a requirement of the role,” Fleck says. “How many 20-year-old Dominican baseball player-actors could we find?”

But they were out there, on the field.

“My brother told me about some auditions,” says Perez Soto, who now lives in Boston. “But I didn’t go to the casting, because there was a baseball game at the same time.” It was only after the casting call was over, and Fleck and Boden came to the nearby field where Perez Soto was playing, that the young man was invited to audition.

“They asked me if I wanted to be an actor,” he says, “and I said yes, but only because I thought that’s what they wanted to hear. ‘Yeah, I want to be an actor.’ But no, not really.”

He has since changed his mind.

“Of course everyone in the Dominican Republic has a plan to come here, even if it’s just to see New York,” Perez Soto says. “I had a plan to come here, but it was supposed to be because of the baseball, you know? I thought I’d be signed by a team and come here to play, and become a star like the others, but it didn’t happen to me.”

By making the movie he did get to meet some of his idols, as well as the former pitcher Jose Rijo, who was a consultant on the film. And that connection brought the filmmakers a little closer to the problems bedeviling Dominican baseball than they would have liked.

Last month Rijo was fired from his job as a special assistant to Jim Bowden, the general manager of the Washington Nationals, amid a continuing federal investigation into whether scouts and executives took kickbacks from signing bonuses promised to Dominican players. Bowden resigned soon afterward, denying what he called false allegations by the press.

But the high-profile departures have spotlighted the unsavory practices of local talent brokers known as buscones, who sign players as young as 10. (Dominican players can be signed by any team when they turn 16.) The brokers have been accused of feeding players steroids, altering players’ birth certificates to make them appear younger and grabbing an exorbitant share of signing bonuses.

“Thirty to 40 percent is pretty standard,” Fleck says. “Any industry where there’s a lot of money to be made and there are poor people involved, there’s going to be some exploitation on some level. But we really didn’t want to focus on that.”

Nor did they want to focus on drugs, principally steroids, the use of which is commonplace in the Dominican Republic. What the filmmakers were after was a new way of telling an age-old story, of hopes, dreams and what happens when life throws you a change-up.

“I’ve been improving my English,” says Perez Soto. “I’ve been practicing and improving every day, because I want to be ready when this movie comes out. I want to be ready in case something else is coming.”